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The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World's Most Expensive Painting Kindle Edition

by Ben Lewis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 294 ratings

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An epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the recently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million—and might not be the real thing.

In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil painting the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction. In the words of its discoverer, the image of Christ as savior of the world is “the rarest thing on the planet.” Its $450 million sale price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting.

For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo’s assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced they had it. But did they?

The Last Leonardo tells a thrilling tale of a spellbinding icon invested with the power to make or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings, and sheikhs. Ben Lewis takes us to Leonardo’s studio in Renaissance Italy; to the court of Charles I and the English Civil War; to Amsterdam, Moscow, and New Orleans; to the galleries, salerooms, and restorer’s workshop as the painting slowly, painstakingly emerged from obscurity. The vicissitudes of the highly secretive art market are charted across six centuries. It is a twisting tale of geniuses and oligarchs, double-crossings and disappearances, in which we’re never quite certain what to believe. Above all, it is an adventure story about the search for lost treasure, and a quest for the truth.

Praise for The Last Leonardo

“The story of the world’s most expensive painting is narrated with great gusto and formidably researched detail in Ben Lewis’s book. . . . Lewis’s probings of the Salvator’s backstory raise questions about its historical status and visibility, and these lead in turn to the fundamental question of whether the painting is really an autograph work by Leonardo.”—Charles Nicholl, The Guardian

“As the art historian and critic Ben Lewis shows in his forensically detailed and gripping investigation into the history, discovery and sales of the painting, establishing the truth is like nailing down jelly.”— Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times

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“As the art historian and critic Ben Lewis shows in his forensically detailed and gripping investigation into the history, discovery and sales of the painting, establishing the truth is like nailing down jelly.”— Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times

About the Author

Ben Lewis is an art critic, author, documentary filmmaker, and visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. He has written widely about art and culture for the international press, including The Times, The Telegraph, London Evening Standard, The Observer, Prospect, Libération, and Die Welt. His award-winning documentary films include The Beatles, Hippies and Hells Angels: Inside the Crazy World of Apple; Google and the World Brain; Poor Us: An Animated History of Poverty; The Great Contemporary Art Bubble; Art Safari; and Constantin Brancusi: The Monk of Modernism. Lewis has an MA in history and art history from Trinity College/Cambridge University, and he also studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Flight to London

Robert Simon had plenty of legroom on his flight to London in May 2008. He was flying first class, an unusual luxury for this comfortably successful but unostentatious Old Masters dealer, president of the invitation-only Private Art Dealers Association. During moments of transatlantic turbulence he cast a glance down the aisle at one of the first-class cabins’ closets, where he had been given permission to stow a slim but oversize case.

It contained a Renaissance painting, 26 inches high and 18 inches across, of a “half-figure,” to use the oldfashioned art historical term, of Christ. The portrait composition showed the face, chest, and arms, with one hand raised in blessing and the other holding a transparent orb. One reason Simon was worried about the painting was that he had not been able to afford the insurance premium he had been quoted for it. He had bought it three years earlier for around $10,000—or so he had told the media—but it was now thought to be worth between $100 million and $200 million.

Far from being the life of luxury many people imagine, dealing in art can be a precarious existence even at the highest levels, because selling expensive paintings is, well, very expensive. Top-end galleries have vertiginous overheads. Walls have to be repainted for each show, catalogues printed, wealthy collectors wined and dined. Simon had spent tens of thousands of dollars restoring the boxed painting, and had not yet seen a penny in return.

Solidly built, medium height, Jewish, fifty-something, soft-spoken, polite, Robert Simon is the kind of person who believes that modesty and understatement are rewarded by the higher forces that direct our lives. He projects a pleasant but slightly brittle calm. “Loose lips sink ships,” he likes to say, repurposing a slogan emblazoned on American propaganda posters in the Second World War to the business of art.

Simon leaned backward in his seat. He was overcome by that mood men fall into when they know the die has been cast, the pieces arranged on the board, and there is nothing more they can do except perform a sequence of now predetermined actions. There could be no more organizing, influencing, persuading. It was all done, to the best of his abilities. The confinement of the long pod of the aircraft cabin and the sensation of forward motion provided by the thrust of four jet engines combined into a physical metaphor for this moment in his life.

Alongside the submarine, the parachute, and the machine gun, the airplane was the most famous invention anticipated by the artist who had consumed Simon’s life for the previous five years. Leonardo da Vinci was not the first human who had designed flying machines, and it is likely he never built one himself, but he had studied the subject for longer, written more, and drawn designs of greater sophistication than anyone before him. His ideas for human flight were based on years of watching and analyzing the airborne movements of birds, bats, and flying insects, and recording his observations in notes and drawings. His resulting insights exemplified his uncanny ability to deduce the science behind natural phenomena. As Simon felt air currents lifting up the plane, he recalled how Leonardo was the first to recognize that the movement of air was as important to a bird’s flight as the movement of its wings.

On April 15, 1505, Leonardo completed the draft treatise On the Flight of Birds, also known as the Turin Codex. It was only about forty pages long, filled with unusually neat lines of text, written in black ink in his trademark mirrored handwriting, right to left, interspersed with geometric diagrams, and the margins sometimes decorated with tiny, beautiful sketches of birds in flight. Leonardo’s early ornithopters, or “birdcraft,” had wings shaped like a bat’s because, as he wrote, a bat’s wing has “a permeable membrane” and could be more lightly constructed than “the wings of feathered birds,” which had to be “more powerful in bone and tendon.” Leonardo positioned his pilot horizontally in a frame underneath the two wings, where he was to use his arms and legs to push a system of rods and levers to make them flap. Historians say Leonardo soon came to realize that the human body was too heavy, and its muscles too weak, to provide enough power for flight, so his later designs had fixed wings and were more like gliders. He imagined launching one, appropriately, from a mountain “named after a great bird,” referring to Monte Ceceri, or “Mount Swan,” in Tuscany. Relishing the avian metaphors, Leonardo wrote that his “great bird will take its first flight on the back of the great swan, filling the universe with amazement, filling all writings with its renown and bringing glory to the nest in which it was born.” Nothing he designed ever flew. The contraptions were almost daft, but there was prophetic genius in his perception of the laws of nature that gave rise to his machines.

Robert Simon knew that, whatever the outcome of this trip—and that really could be everything or nothing—it marked the pinnacle of his career to date in the art world. If everything went well, he would probably earn a place in the art history books. If not, he would remain respected but unexceptional. This flight also represented the apogee of something more personal. In common with most art dealers, there was a motivation behind his career that had nothing to do with money or success, and that had shaped his life for somewhat longer: an unconditional, unrelenting love for art; not modern and contemporary art with its splodges, squiggles, and splats, but the great art of the past, especially the Renaissance, in which the eternal stories of the Bible and of ancient Greece and Rome were brought to life by the melodramatic gestures of bearded men and golden-haired women, amidst thick gleaming crumples of silk and satin cloth, set against a classical backdrop of esplanades and porticos, temples and fortresses.

When he was fifteen, Simon went on a school trip to Italy. He still remembers the winding roads of the hills around Florence, the low sun flashing through the cypress trees as the bus drove toward the town of Vinci, the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci, from Vinci. (By coincidence, my parents would take me on a similar trip in my own teenage years.) “Leonardo has been my deity for most of my life—and I am not alone,” Simon told me. “He’s my idea of the greatest person that civilization has produced.” Over the decades Simon had seen every major Leonardo exhibition that had been staged, and every Leonardo painting, and “as many drawings as I could.” His professional life, which now revolved around Leonardo, had taken him once before into the artist’s sphere, in 1993, when he was asked to examine the Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s revered manuscripts, for its owners. It is now owned by Bill Gates, but then belonged to the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s foundation.

Simon’s family was well-to-do but had not been deeply involved in art. His father was a salesman of eyeglasses. Simon was sent to an exclusive, academically oriented high school, Horace Mann School, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Afterward he specialized in medieval and Renaissance studies, and then art history, at Columbia University. He wrote his PhD on a newly discovered painting by the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino, which was held in a private collection. A portrait of the Florentine Medici ruler Cosimo I in gleaming armor, it was known from the many copies, around twenty-five of them, which hung in museums and homes, or sat in storerooms around the world. Art historians had long considered that the original work was the one in the Uffizi, Florence’s famous museum. However, in a story with uncanny parallels to that of the painting that he was now taking to London, the young Simon had argued that he had identified an earlier original of this painting, the owners of which wished to remain anonymous. He published an article about it in the esteemed journal of connoisseurship and painting, the Burlington Magazine. The painting now hangs in an Australian museum, as a Bronzino, although some experts still believe it was painted by the artist’s assistants.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07PVW72W9
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books (June 25, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 25, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 46386 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 338 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #682,210 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #72 in Renaissance Art
- #180 in 21st Century World History
- #360 in Biographies of Artists, Architects & Photographers (Kindle Store)

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4.5 294 ratings

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Amazon Customer

Great read, but when does it fall apart?

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2020

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This is a fantastic book; you get not only the story of the Salvator Mundi, but an excellent biography and art history resource. The story isn’t over. At some point, the painting will resurface and add more chapters. Hopefully Ben Lewis will be at hand to chronicle them.

One thing left me puzzled. The book states in passing that the wood panel on which the Salvator is painted has been “scientifically proven” to have come from the same walnut tree as the panels of two other known Leonardos. I submit that this is where Simon and Parrish won the lottery, and seems like something that deserves at least its own chapter - what is the proof? Who did the tests? When? Etc.

The other thing that would be helpful is an evidentiary wrap-up at the end. The wood panel having emerged from Leonardo’s workshop would seem to be a very strong connection. The total lack of even a trace reference to the work in any contemporaneous document, where we’re dealing with a celebrity artist who left thousands of pages of journals, is the downfall. The idea that Leo would have painted the work in secret is silly.

So we end up comfortably settled on Lewis’s conclusion - it’s a workshop painting that may have a few of Leo’s brush strokes. The rest is a clinic on the fantasy machinery of the human mind, brilliantly told. Lewis can’t really even count the votes among the art community - they can’t seem to speak freely! Truly a post-truth Leonardo.

And lastly, where are the predictions? What’s the over/under on when the obviously skeptical experts will succeed in overturning the “consensus?” I’ll wager as soon as they start to retire; won’t be too long.

4 people found this helpful

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Jeff Price

A Well-studied Historical Thriller, exciting and enlightening

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2019

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I thought I knew something about Leonardo and this painting, but there was so much more to learn! Ben Lewis has documented as much as is possible to know today about this remarkable painting with an even more remarkable history. I’m buying another copy since I gave away my first copy the day I finished it, saying it was one of the best and most informative art history books I’ve read. Of course there is stuff we can’t know for sure after 500 years, but the epic manipulation of the art world is masterfully documented. Not knowing where the painting is today, and not being sure how almost half a billion dollars passed through so many hands adds to the mystery. The photographs included here give added insights to the painting and its history, and I look forward to hearing more about the brilliant restoration and the hoped-for exhibition of this intriguing masterpiece.

17 people found this helpful

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Dean

Channeling the da Vinci code

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2019

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Two plucky grunts in the art world take a chance on an item at an estate sale and turn a few bucks into millions. Yep, the stuff of dreams and ostensibly the story behind the unearthing of what might (or might not be) Leonardo's last surviving work. This backdrop is used a little too aggressively to grab the reader in a detective-story grip but what unfolds is a little more subtle. The next 300 pages provides a fascinating and sometimes depressing peek behind the curtains of the art world and auction house operations that pretend to advance culture but exist purely to exact profit.

The story is remarkable and Lewis has done an admirable job of untangling the various strands which mix evidence with myth, records with interpretations, and judgement with wishful thinking. The economic facts are fairly clear, a bargain basement purchase turns out to be a work that sells for more than any other painting in history. But along the way, one's faith in the ability of experts to actually know what they are talking about is called into question repeatedly. How does one actually determine who put paint to canvas centuries ago when we know such work was often the result of a workshop not an individual? How many times has an old master been touched up or refinished over the years rendering the contemporary version distinct from the original? When records of ownership have gaps spanning years and decades, who really knows the provenance of anything, so why do we rely so much on this to determine authenticity?

This book is an examination of one painting but it lifts the lid on the amount of fakery that exists among the 'experts' who are called on to judge originality, worth, and origins of objects. In a remarkable twist here we even learn that the very auction house that sold the painting for a world-record sum, failed to buy it years before in an estate appraisal as they considered it worthless. Plausible deniability of their ignorance follows, and they make a huge fee on the sale in the end presenting it as a true da Vinci, but this turns out to be typical of so many of the participants here -- motivated by self-interest and profit, from collectors to restorers, dealers to scholars, curators to creditors, the claim that it's "about art" is shown to be a smokescreen behind which most participants hide.

There's a lot of research here, mostly uncredited until the afterword, and in a world of intrigue, it's not surprising then that one of the players in the story seems to be reviewing the book here too, suggesting the author might not be as accurate as he could have been. It all adds to the plot. Is this a detective story or an expose? Probably a bit of both, and a good read as a result.

5 people found this helpful

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John DelConte

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2023

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Book was very interesting a good reading.

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Anne G Huske

People magazine account

Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2020

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Some interesting information, but poorly structured and written. The book lacks a clear point of view resulting to an overload of extraneous details and at its worst conspiracy theories. I haven’t read the book by some of the principals but found myself wishing I had.

2 people found this helpful

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voracious reader

Fascinating mystery

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2022

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A great read, well written and researched.

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Kindle Customer

Quick fulfillment of order

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2021

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A great overview of the art world evaluations of possible lost masters. The book is written almost like a mystery...I'm more than halfway through and I still don't know who did it of who didn't do it.

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Amazon Customer

Best book I've read for a long time.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2024

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Great book, whether you're interested in art history or not you won't be able to put this book down! A must for Leonardo fans!

Evlyne Laurin

Well research, insightful but you need to love intricate details and must read carefully.

Reviewed in Canada on April 28, 2020

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I hesitate a long time before buying this book, going back and forth about if I would enjoy it. I remember following the last auction at Christie's, questioning the provenance and authenticity of it and all the (bad - and good) jokes that came with its record-breaking price. I have a master's in Contemporary Art, and by moment I felt like I did when I first watch Games of Throne - lost within all the name dropping... I had to write down notes to follow. At times, it was just enjoyable and easy to read. It is a book worth reading if you enjoy a mix of art history, biography, research and debate. The position of the author is sometimes bias, sometimes straight on, as he can't choose a side. Entertaining at the very least, and fairly actual by times.

Suvobrata Ganguly

Loved the book

Reviewed in India on October 6, 2019

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but then again Leonardo is more than a ninja turtle, you know?

Casey Roo

Fascinating - science and skulduggery, well-written and seriously interesting.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 30, 2019

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I'm so glad I bought this. I knew nothing at all about art history, thought it was probably concerned with memorising dates and remembering the difference between Monet and Manet. But there's so much more - it took me into a world I'd never really thought about.

So - who painted it in the first place? Did they have help? Whose help? Who copied, and what? Clues to its being Leonardo ... clues to its not being ... goodness me.

Then - who bought it? Why? Did they know what they were buying? Whom were they trying to impress?

How long did it spend time unrecognised on strange walls? Who passed it by without recognising it? Why did a couple of art dealers decide to take a punt on its being a genuine Leonardo?

Then - and this is fascinating - what constitutes 'restoration' and where do you draw then line between restoration and re-painting? Why wasn't the restoration better documented? (Not to mention lots of interesting information about how Leonardo got skin to glow and drapery to fold).

And finally - who's buying art nowadays, and why? Do they know what they're doing? Who's being naive, and who's being cunning ... and where's the damn thing gone to, because it seems to be hidden away again.

I learned so much; it's such a well-written story; I'm really pleased that I read it. Whether or not you're a budding art historian, do buy it.

12 people found this helpful

Noelle Hall

The Importance of Being by Leonardo

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2019

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A fascinating account of the events leading up to the sale in 2017 of 'Salvatore Mundi' as a newly discovered and restored work by Leonardo da Vinci of Christ the Saviour of the World. A detective-style account of the process that led to this event and of the different opinions about the painting. It is heavily restored; some parts of it are Leonardo-esque, some more like paintings painted by others in his workshop. Yet the painting has the unique Leonardo style, expression and quality: in my view if he had painted Christ in Majesty this painting would be it. The book also provides a commentary on the art market and the huge sums exchanged. The painting is now in a secure storage vault but anyone can access photographs of it already on the internet and form their own opinion.

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